However, there are many words that do not contain a
vowel letter (defined as A, E, I, O, U) in their written form. In most of these, such as
try, the letter Y stands for a
vowel sound. (Abbreviations such as km are not considered words in their own
right.)

Contents

Words without vowel
letters

A large number of Modern English words spell the /ɪ/ or /aɪ/ sound with the
letter Y, such as my, by, try, sky, why, fry, gym, hymnmyrrh, lynx, lynch, myth, pygmy, flyby, and syzygy. The longest such word in common use
is rhythms, and the
longest such word in Modern English is the obsolete 17th-century
word symphysy. (If archaic words
and spellings are considered, there are many more, the longest
perhaps being twyndyllyngs, the plural of twyndyllyng.) The poem "And
Sometimes" by Christian Bök contains over 60 words with
only consonants.[1]

In the computer game The 7th Guest, one of the puzzles
involves a vowelless sentence,

Shy gypsy slyly spryly tryst by my crypt.

Similarly, the letter w stands for a vowel sound (/u/) in Welsh words, and two of these have
entered Modern English:

The crwth
(pronounced /ˈkrʊθ/ or /ˈkruːθ/ and also spelled cruth) is a
Welsh musical instrument similar to the violin:

There is also the mathematical expression nth
(pronounced /ˈɛnθ/), as in delighted to the nth
degree, which has entered common usage. The internet slang
term pwn probably arose as
a common typo for own.

Words
without vowel sounds

Rhotic dialects, such as in Canada and the United States, have
many words such as bird, learn, girl, church, worst, which
some phoneticians analyze as having no vowels, only a syllabic
consonant, [ɹ̩]. However, others analyze these words
instead as having a rhotic vowel, [ɝ]. The difference may be partially one of
dialect.

There are a few such words which are disyllabic, like cursor, curtain, and turtle:[ˈkɹ̩sɹ̩], [ˈkɹ̩tn̩] and [ˈtɹ̩tl̩] (or [ˈkɝːsɚ], [ˈkɝːtən], and [ˈtɝːtəl]), and even a few which are
trisyllabic, such as purpler[ˈpɹ̩.pl̩.ɹ̩], hurdler[ˈhɹ̩.dl̩.ɹ̩], gurgler[ˈɡɹ̩.ɡl̩.ɹ̩], certainer[ˈsɹ̩.tn̩.ɹ̩], and Ur-turtle[ˈɹ̩.tɹ̩.tl̩]. The words wyrm and myrrh contain neither a vowel letter nor a
vowel sound in these dialects: [ˈwɹ̩m], [ˈmɹ̩] (or [ˈwɝːm], [ˈmɝː]).

The word and frequently contracts to a simple nasal consonant’n, as in lock 'n key[ˌlɒk ŋ ˈkiː]. Words such as will,
have, and is regularly contract to ’ll [l],
’ve [v], and ’s [z]. However, none of them are
pronounced alone without vowels.

Onomatopoeic
words that can be pronounced alone, and which have no vowels or Rs,
include hmm, pht!, pst!, shh!, tsk!, and zzz.

Other
languages

There are other languages that form lexical words without any
vowel sounds. In Croatian and Serbian, for
example, the consonants [r] and [rː] (the difference is not written) can act as
a syllable
nucleus and carry rising or falling tone;
examples include the tongue-twister na vrh brda vrba mrda
and geographic names such as Krk. In Czech, and Slovak, either [l] or [r] can stand in for vowels: vlk[vl̩k] "wolf", krk[kr̩k] "neck". A particularly long word without
vowels is čtvrthrst, meaning "quarter-handful", with two
syllables (one for each R). Whole sentences can be made from such
words, such as Strč prst skrz krk, meaning
"stick a finger through your neck" (follow the link for a sound
file), and Smrž pln skvrn zvlhl z mlh "A morel full of
spots wetted from fogs". (Here zvlhl has two syllables
based on L; note that the prepositionz
consists of a single consonant. Only prepositions do this in Czech,
and they normally link phonetically to the following noun, so do
not really behave as vowelless words.) In Russian, there are also
prepositions that consist of a single consonant letter, like
k "to", v "in", and s "with". However,
these forms are actually contractions of ko, vo,
and so respectively, and these forms are still used in
modern Russian before words with certain consonant clusters for
ease of pronunciation.

In Kazakh
and certain other Turkic languages, words without vowel
sounds may occur due to reduction of weak vowels. A common example
is the Kazakh word for one: bir, pronounced [br=]. Among
careful speakers, however, the original vowel may be preserved, and
the vowels are always preserved in the orthography.

In Southern dialects of Chinese, such as Cantonese or Minnan, some
monosyllabic words are made of exclusively nasals, such as
[m̩˨˩] "no" and [ŋ̩˩˧] "five".

So far, all of these syllabic consonants, at least in the lexical words, have been sonorants, such as [r], [l],
[m], and [n], which have a voicing quality similar to vowels.
However, there are languages with words that not only contain no
vowels, but contain no sonorants at all, like shh! in
English. These include Lolo, some Berber languages, some of the
northwestern Bantu languages, and some languages of
the American Pacific Northwest, such as Nuxálk. An
example from the latter is sxs "seal fat" (pronounced
[sxs], as spelled), and a longer one is
xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓
(pronounced [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]) "he had had in his
possession a bunchberry plant". (Follow the Nuxálk link for other
examples.) Berber examples include /tkkststt/ "you took it off" and /tfktstt/ "you gave it". Some words may contain
one or two consonants only: /ɡ/ "be", /ks/ "feed on".[3] In Mandarin
Chinese, words and syllables such as sī and
zhī are sometimes described as being syllabic fricatives
and affricates phonemically, /ś/ and /tʂ́/, but phonetically they contain a sonorant
segment that carries the tone.